In short: The mailbag's first question and his most direct sell call. "The Canadian banks right now — they pulled back a bit, but generally speaking around here, they're trading at the most expensive in multi-decades in terms of PE, but also price to book." The earnings quality is the argument: "they've made a lot of money on trading. It's not just the lending business… It's everything: insurance, portfolio management, and trading. They've done super well. And that's cyclical. One day we'll have a recession, one day we'll have a bear market and that side of the business won't grow. In fact, it will probably decline." He rejects the host's "banks are different now, more stable fee income" thesis on the same ground: "I disagree with the part where the money management is not cyclical. If we have a bear market — no guarantee, but obviously assets under management goes down. If we have a market of down 20%, trading goes down, volume goes down." Add the unpriced political risk — "you're not paying a discount for that risk. Right now people are paying the highest premium they have ever paid. I just don't like your risk/reward." His practical advice, given as real advice to a friend's father: in a tax-free account "it's a no-brainer. Sell them, because you don't pay taxes by selling them. And then wait and you might be able to buy them cheaper down the road… they'll probably be at the same price or lower. So buy them back later." Asked if he would short them: "we're allowed to short in the way we do so, but I'm not going to tell you which ones I'm doing" — and he later lists "shorts on Canadian banks, semiconductors, the S&P 500" without objection.
The Canadian banks have just reported excellent results, and Tardif's point is that this is precisely the problem. Very little of the recent strength came from ordinary lending. It came from trading desks, wealth management, portfolio management and insurance — businesses whose profits rise and fall with markets. Paying a record multiple for peak earnings from cyclical businesses is the classic way to lose money slowly in a "safe" stock.
He takes on directly the popular argument that the banks have become structurally better — more diversified, more fee income, less loan-dependent. He grants the diversification, then points out that the fee income is not the stable kind people assume: in a bear market, assets under management shrink, and in a 20% drawdown trading volumes fall too. So the supposedly defensive earnings decline at exactly the same moment the loan book deteriorates.
Then he adds the risk nobody is being paid for: political noise about Canadian banks' access to the US market. He does not expect anything to come of it, but "you're not paying a discount for that risk. Right now people are paying the highest premium they have ever paid." His practical advice, given to a friend's father, is unusually concrete: if the shares sit in a tax-free account, selling costs nothing in tax, so harvest the gain and buy them back later — because six months or a year from now they will likely be "at the same price or lower." He confirms Timelo is permitted to short banks and does so, while declining to say which.
21:58— Yeah. No, I agree with you too. The Canadian banks right now — they pulled back a bit, but generally speaking around here, they're trading at the most expensive in multi-decades in terms of PE, but also price to book. They've made a lot of money on trading. It's not just the lending business that they're doing well.
Nothing matches this filter.
Verbatim excerpts from the public transcripts (auto-pulled at each mention's timestamp, lightly cleaned). Timestamps link into the video; "source page" opens that commentator's full analysis at this row. Click a mention's header line to expand it (one open at a time). For personal study — not investment advice.